If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme

Phoronix: Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme

This morning Sapphire Technology is announcing a new Radeon graphics card. It's not though part of the Radeon HD 6000 series that has recently seen the launch of the Radeon HD 6790 or even the Radeon HD 6450, but rather it's a Cypress-based part. Yes, as in the Radeon HD 5800 series. This new graphics card is the Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme and it has designed to deliver the best performance for the ~$120 USD price point. Here is our look at this new graphics card with accompanying Linux benchmarks.

An oss driver comparision would be also cool. I found out that one xorg.conf option extremely improves ati oss driver performance for games: SwapbuffersWait - set it to false and you will see what i mean. For nouveau another tuning is required as it defaults to run the cards at boot clocks. Best ask the devs how to switch it, it is a tiny bit complicated but the result is worth the effort.

An oss driver comparision would be also cool. I found out that one xorg.conf option extremely improves ati oss driver performance for games: SwapbuffersWait - set it to false and you will see what i mean. For nouveau another tuning is required as it defaults to run the cards at boot clocks. Best ask the devs how to switch it, it is a tiny bit complicated but the result is worth the effort.

So much for the "you don't need a xorg.conf anymore" that gets tossed around in the ml/forums that some X / kernel devs like to throw around.

The oss drivers are tuned for stability, not performance. This is true that a tool should be created to tweak the xorg/mesa options for stability/performance/visual fidelity. Just like amd's control center and nVidia's nvidia-settings

Interesting card for the price point.
Given than it's also roughly 20% more expensive than the 5770, seems the HD5k-series scale pretty well here performance wise (Can't really say the same about the 6870 though). Personally I think I'd still go for the 5770 because of the single 6-pin PCI-E.

Side note, given the special cooler, temperature levels would have been interesting. (Acoustic levels too, but that would need extra equipment).